Australia's government announced on 27 June 2026 that it will double the maximum penalty for social media platforms that fail to keep under-16s off their services to A$99 million (approximately US$68 million), up from the existing ceiling of A$49.5 million. Proposed legislation will also expand the information-gathering powers of the eSafety Commissioner, allowing the regulator to compel social media companies, age-checking firms and app stores to provide evidence of what they have done to prevent under-16s from obtaining accounts. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said 'It's clear Big Tech are not doing enough to comply with the law – there are still too many children on social media' [Source: Al Jazeera]. Communications Minister Anika Wells said platforms were 'adopting tricks straight out of the Big Tech playbook and doing the bare minimum to get by' [Source: Al Jazeera].
The eSafety Commissioner is actively investigating possible non-compliance by five platforms: Meta Platforms' Instagram and Facebook, Alphabet's YouTube, Snap's Snapchat and TikTok [Source: CNBC]. Meta (META), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Snap (SNAP) are the publicly listed companies named in the investigations. The announcement fell on a Saturday, outside regular trading hours, and no market reaction data was available at the time of publication.
Australia's ban on children under the age of 16 holding accounts on ten key social media platforms came into force on 10 December 2025, making it a global test case for countries attempting to curb children's access to social media. The government said that since the ban took effect, more than five million under-16 accounts have been deactivated or restricted [Source: CNBC]. However, a study published in the British Medical Journal, which examined 408 adolescents, found that 85% of Australians aged 12 to 15 were still using social media three months after the ban came into effect [Source: CNBC]. The same study found that two-thirds of underage users who remained online did so by self-declaring an age above 16, or by posting a selfie that the platform accepted as evidence of being over 16.
In April 2026, an industry body representing technology suppliers attributed difficulties enforcing the ban to social media platforms' weak deployment of age-verification tools that were already available, rather than to limitations in the underlying technology. The new legislative package, if passed, would give the eSafety Commissioner direct powers to demand documents and evidence from platforms as part of its compliance investigations.
Sources: Bloomberg, CNBC, BBC News, Al Jazeera, eSafety Commissioner